Final Escape

I have completed the Zero Escape series. If you've never heard of this amazing series, now is a great time to get on board. Zero Escape is a series of visual novels with puzzle game elements. Do you remember those Escape the Room type games online, like Escape the Car, Escape the Room, stuff like that? This is a whole series with gameplay like that. It all started back in 2010 with 999 and it changed the game as we know it forever. The gameplay. the story and the way everything came together was epic. There were multiple ways the story could go based on your decisions and different endings based on it. Each game would implement this rule but each would do it in it's own unique way. Oh, and each game had its own fantastic twist as well. 999's big twist, sorry, this post will feature massive spoilers to the ENTIRE Zero Escape series. MASSIVE, like, you'll know the basis of the story for each game massive. You've been warned....

SPOILERS!!!!

OK, so 999 puts 9 strangers on a ship and has them play the Nonary Game. They each have a bracelet with a number on it and they have to break up into teams to enter the doors with numbers on it. Basically, add the numbers up to match the door numbers. Like, if I was 5, you were 3 and your friend was 7, that equals 15, so we can go through the number 5 door. The doors you pick determine what ending and events you see. The game does something very unique, something that I hadn't experienced in games at that point. The game makes you go through to a bad ending, just so you can get the good ending. This is all explained in game as well as the main character Junpei basically remembers failing in a different timeline. He shouldn't remember that. The player should but how does the character  do that? This is all explained by some crazy quantum physics and how the character can access the morphogenetic field to see his experiences on different timelines. It's CRAZY deep but the game does a great job of explaining it and wrapping up the game. I thought this would be a one off type game but somehow, enough fan demand got this a sequel.

The sequel is more of the game, but there's a lot of jumping around different timelines and the only way to get the true ending is by finding things out from different timelines. Like, for example, in one timeline, there are these bombs about to go off and you don't know the passwords to disarm them so you have to go to various timelines to get them. It's awesome! The big twist in this one is that Sigma, the main character, is actually Zero, the mastermind of the game but you would never know because they never show his face in the game. You see pictures of what he looks like in the promotional material and such but this isn't the Sigma you're playing as. You're actually old Sigma, who is Zero Sr. You then find out they are planning to send themselves back to 2029, they're in the year 2078, to stop this virus, Radical-6, from getting out. This sets up the plot for the third game in the series, which takes place between the two.

Zero Time Dilemma starts off with a lot of jumping around, this is because during the game, they're injected with a mind memory drug and then forget the last 90 minutes of progress. They 9 people are broken up into three teams and you play as the leader of each team. Junpei, Akane, Sigma and Phi all return from the previous games. The big twist in this game is that there is actually 10 people around during the game, and it fools you into thinking a character is a certain person but he's not. The character Q is thought to have been the weird child character with the helmet on his head but it turns out, he's not Q. He's not even apart of the game. The person that is Q is actually an old man in a wheelchair, who they believe is mute, blind and deaf. This turns out to actually be the Zero of this game, who is also Sigma and Diana's son and twin brother of Phi. Yes, this is all a lot to take in. Zero, or his real name, Delta, is doing all of this to basically be born. If he never locks up Sigma and Diana, he can't be born but he's also doing it to prevent death to the entire human race. Basically, he wants Radical-6 to be released because if it is, only 6 billion of the 8 billion people in the world will die. If the virus doesn't get out, a religious fanatic will end up killing the entire race anyway. He's basically taking the lesser of two evils in this situation. The game ends with one final decision, Zero throws Carlos a gun. He can either kill him or let him walk away. The game ends at that point. There's also a timeline that shows you how the events are set for Virtue's Last Reward. The game is a nice conclusion to a fantastic sci-fi story.

I haven't done justice to the explanation of the story of all three games but I will say this; these three games have given me so much thought to how the world works and if there are really multiple universes out there. It's crazy how much I learned from these games. I can't believe that 999 got a sequel and it seemed liked Virtue's Last Reward wasn't going to get one but I'm glad that we were able to full experience this story. If I had to rank the games from best to least best, it would go VLR, 999 then ZTD. ZTD's production values were lacking and I prefer the stop motion or 2D animation much more. VLR just did the timeline jumping introduced in 999 so perfectly and it had the best twists and I generally couldn't put it down. I was obsessed and it was the longest of the three. I highly recommend anyone with a DS to play and purchase all three games. If you like mystery novels, this is worth every penny.

Danganronpa, your move.